Jesse Rose - Didn't I EP

Tracklist /A1 Didn't I (Original)
A2 Didn't I (Jesse's Made To Play Edit)
B Didn't I (Audion Remix)

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Jesse Rose - Didn't I EPJesse Rose’s latest single is taken off his well-received ‘Body Language: Volume 3’ compilation released on Get Physical and features a ‘Made to Play Edit’ by Jesse Rose himself and Matthew Dear under his Audion guise. The original and the two remixes are a fascinating study in repetition and the thin line that separates a great track from something less. Jesse Rose aims high on his two versions of the track, but it takes an outsider (Audion) for it to realize its full potential.

The EP opens with the original mix, and it has all the necessary ingredients of a great dance track. It bounces along at a nice pace, it is well-produced and it has enough variation to keep the listener occupied over its full length. Unfortunately a pounding bassline overshadows all the good parts of this track, including a great cut-up vocal sample trademark of Jesse Rose’s previous work. Really a superb track, but it falls just short.

Perhaps Rose himself knows this, and he attempts to correct that with his ‘Made to Play Edit.’ All he really needed to do here was play to the strengths of the track, and just tweak it a little – maybe recede the bassline a little farther to the background. He was just a hair away from perfection with the original, but instead he decides to blast it all away with a UFO swell straight out of the X Files circa 1997. It’s like one step forward and two steps back, and perhaps an outsider is needed to add some fresh perspective.

Enter Audion, known for his serrated, almost primal, take on techno. Instead of turning the cut into a dance floor killer like last year’s smash ‘Mouth To Mouth’, he offers a surprisingly understated take. Dear strips away the plodding bassline and lets the track breathe over the now extended eight minute length. The whispery vocal sample now takes center stage, benefiting exponentially from it, and the delicately builds and releases work to even better effect than the original, modulating just enough to hold the listener’s attention past the full running time. The addition of tangent keyboard lines is the final touch, and this record has gone from the back of my crate to front and center. Audion could see this track was close to perfection, and his hands off approach to remixing really shows that less is indeed more.